Fergus Cassidy

Ho ho no

IF shopping is the new religion then advertising is its angelus bell or call to prayer. A reminder to the flock that services are available at the huge urban cathedrals, 24/7 if required. In a couple of weeks time the biggest spending spree of the year - probably of any year - will begin. Lent turned on its head.

Like any religion, there are the agnostics who haven't made up their minds yet about shopping. They generally buy using cash, as credit cards are the chosen icon of the faithful.

Then there are the atheists, unbelieving and ungrateful. And unpatriotic, if economists are right that consumer spending is an important factor behind economic growth.

As Christmas nears, the shopping heathens will forsake the warmth of the brightly lit multi-storey elevators and the nostalgic sounds of Yuletide tunes. Instead they have organised a global campaign against shopping. Buying or nothingness.

"If you think Christmas has gotten too commercialised, here's your chance to do nothing about it", said Aiden Enns, the founder of Buy Nothing Christmas.

Now in its fifth year, the US-founded campaign has spread worldwide through the web. Last Christmas, it organised a musical which portrayed the fortunes of a teenage anti-consumer as she tried to pull her mother out of her shopaholic habits.

Other activities include forming alternative carol singing groups and visiting shopping malls. One of their favourite songs goes:

Slow down ye frantic shoppers, there's something we must say,
If you would spare a moment all the stores would go away,
Big business has been telling us what Christmas means today,
Now it's time we decided for ourselves, for ourselves,
Yes, it's time we decided for ourselves.

Enns is not opposed to giving gifts per se. "Gift giving is important. It's a profound action, an important glue that keeps communities strong, people less individualistic. But this gift-giving impulse has been exploited by consumer capitalism and a market that preys upon our appetite for wasteful gadgets and soon-obsolete fashions".

Buy Nothing Christmas is the offshoot of a longer-running campaign, Buy Nothing Day, which started in 1992 in the US but has now spread to over 65 countries. In the US it takes place on the Friday after Thanksgiving Day, (Saturday in other countries), traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Buy Nothing Day involves making "a little pact with yourself. To buy absolutely nothing for 24 hours".

According to the campaign "millions of people do not participate in the doomsday economy, the marketing mind games and the frantic consumer binge. We pause, we make a small choice not to shop. We shrink our footprint and gain some calm".

The campaign hopes such action will bring lasting change. "We want people to make a commitment to consuming less, recycling more and challenging corporations to clean up and be fair. Modern consumerism might offer great choice, but this shouldn't be at the cost of the environment or developing countries".

Buy Nothing Day is the brainchild of Kalle Lasn, a 60-something, former market researcher. His family escaped to Germany from Estonia in 1944, as the Russian army approached. He now lives in Canada.

In 1989 Lasn produced a short film about the disappearing old-growth forests where he lived but couldn't get it shown on commercial television. In response, he started The Media Foundation and founded Adbusters magazine, promoting campaigns such as Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week.

Thanks to the internet, Lasn believes Buy Nothing Day "has become this huge phenomenon around the world. It's sort of like an edgy Earth Day". But his praise of the internet has a caveat, which he said he'll engage with in the future.

"The downside of the internet is that it has spawned a generation of activists who are actually very passive, who basically forward an email to a friend and they think they are being some kind of an activist, and to me that is not the sort of activism that is effective.

"Even cyberspace is now infected with commercialism to the point where I find it annoying to go there."

Lasn is interested in ways to get people to unplug and is thinking of future campaigns around that. "People who grew up with the internet or iPods, that whole digital revolution, are the first generation that spend more time in the electronic environment that they do in the natural environment.

"So we are definitely going to launch social marketing campaigns to get people to pull out of the virtual electronic environment and try to live more than half their lives in the real world".

As things stand, it's impossible to see a campaign like Buy Nothing Day tempting the shopping faithful in Ireland over to the dark side. But it wasn't always so.

Back in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s Buy Nothing day, although not called that, was strictly observed by hundreds of thousands of people throughout this country.

It was the day before dole day.